Meet the 2026 TEDxFargo Speakers

But that is not the version of leadership she is bringing to the TEDxFargo stage.

Her talk, she said, is about collective consciousness, and more specifically, how women can “reconnect, recommit, and reimagine how we change the world together.”

To Ashby, that is the next evolution of business.

“Our business models that we’ve been running our businesses off of are outdated,” she said. “Not outdated in the sense of AI that has forced us to look at things, but more in line with these philosophical viewpoints of separateness.”

Ashby believes the next era of business will require leaders to move away from separateness and toward wholeness. Toward relationships. Toward community. Toward philanthropy. Toward a deeper kind of self-awareness. Toward what she describes as spirituality—not religion, but the essence of who a person is.

“Gone are the days of being the egoic leader,” she said. “The world is in turmoil, and the more we come at it from an egoic mind, the more we forget to be inclusive of others.”

For Ashby, this is not soft thinking. It is not a retreat from business discipline. It is a challenge to look at where that discipline begins.

Too often, she said, leaders build from the outside in. They create a business, define products and services, push for growth, and then try to align their people around the machine they have built.

Ashby is suggesting the opposite.

Start with the self. Understand what is driving you. Understand your nervous system, your emotions, your blind spots, your values, and your purpose. Then build from there.

“When you bridge the inner self,” she said, “the outer results will be far greater.”

That sentence could almost serve as the thesis of her current work.

It also represents a major personal shift.

Ashby said her own turning point came after a mission trip to Chad, Africa. She had gone, in her words, with the subconscious expectation of helping—of doing good, of serving, of being useful.

“I went and I was going to be the hero,” she said. “When I got there, I wasn’t the hero. Everybody else was the hero.”

The experience shook her. She witnessed suffering, death, instability, and a level of human resilience that forced her to reexamine the way she had been moving through the world.

“It was my awakening,” she said. “I’ve really been holding up the world thinking my purpose was to help others, but really I had to help myself before I could see how I was able to help others.”

What followed was not a quick reinvention. It was a healing journey.

Ashby worked with a psychologist experienced in post-traumatic stress disorder. She brought in a spiritual coach. She surrounded herself with women and friends who could “hold space” for her as she processed what she had experienced and began to rebuild from the inside out.

“I’m still on the journey,” she said. “It’s not over. What I realize is it’s not a destination anymore. I think I lived my life in such a destination. Now it’s really just about feeling what I need, hearing what I need, doing what I need, just being—and then, of course, taking action.”

Ashby is not telling business owners to abandon action. She is telling them to examine the place their action comes from.

There is a difference between execution born from fear and execution born from alignment. There is a difference between scaling a business because the market says you should and scaling a business because the work is rooted in a clear purpose. There is a difference between chasing numbers and building something that reflects the truest version of the people behind it.

For business owners, that can be uncomfortable.

Ashby knows it is easier to talk about alignment than to live it. It is easier to say a business should be heart-driven than to risk changing an offer, a service, a customer base, or a strategy that is producing revenue. But she believes many companies are quietly carrying the cost of building around the wrong center.

“If I go beyond the numbers and I go beyond the spreadsheets and I take the time to really sit back and say, ‘What is it that I really want to do in my business?’ we will find that you created a program or a service that was driven by financials instead of by what is heart-driven,” she said.

That does not mean money is irrelevant. It means money cannot be the only compass.

For Ashby, the work begins with questions. Who do I really want to serve? What do I actually want to build? What values are showing up in the way I lead? What blind spots are showing up in the way my business operates? What part of me is driving this decision—fear, ego, scarcity, purpose, love?

She believes a business will reveal all of it.

“Our businesses completely reveal our values and our blind spots,” she said. “Your healed self and your wounded self play out in your business.”

That is a demanding view of leadership. It asks leaders to stop treating business as a separate compartment from the rest of life. It asks them to see the workplace as one of the clearest mirrors they have.

It also asks them to think differently about impact.

Ashby’s idea of collective consciousness is rooted in the belief that individual healing does not stay individual. When one person becomes more grounded, more aware, more compassionate, and less driven by ego, the environment around that person changes.

“When one of us rises, the environment completely shifts,” she said. “When one of us heals ourself, it creates all of this space for others to heal. And when we start to use our voice, then what we’re doing is we’re giving everybody else permission to speak.”

TEDxFargo Speaker: Jen Burgard

The Strength of Being Weak

Jen Burgard did not set out to become a public voice on grief.

She did not set out to build an organization around loss. She did not set out to speak from a TEDxFargo stage. She did not set out to become the person other people point to and say, “You’re so strong.”

In fact, those words have always sat strangely with her.

“I don’t feel strong,” Burgard said. “Sometimes I would prefer people not say that.”

She understands why people do. They mean it kindly. They mean it as encouragement. They mean it as admiration for what she has survived and what she has built.

But strength, as Burgard has come to understand it, can become its own kind of performance.

It can put people on a pedestal when what they really need is someone willing to sit beside them. It can turn survival into something that has to look inspiring before it is considered valuable. It can make grief feel like something a person is supposed to overcome neatly, publicly, and productively.

That is the idea Burgard plans to challenge at TEDxFargo.

“I think as a society we value strength and grit and hustle,” Burgard said. “Work harder, achieve these goals, set your mind to it. But I think there is a version of that that’s unfair to the general person.”

Burgard knows that tension intimately.

After the death of her son, Henry, grief became more than an abstract concept. It became part of the architecture of her life. Like many parents who experience pregnancy or infant loss, she was discharged from the hospital without a baby in her arms, but with a memory box—hand and foot molds, footprints, wisps of hair, cards, notes, and the few physical reminders that would have to stand in for a lifetime. In a piece she later wrote, Burgard described it as “a box of everything you will ever have to remember your child instead of a baby in your arms.”

That kind of loss changes the way a person moves through the world.

For Burgard, grief made her quieter, softer, and more aware of mortality—her own, and the mortality of everyone she loves. It narrowed her circle, but deepened the connections that remained.

“When grief happened to me, my circle every time got smaller,” she said. “My circle got smaller, but my connections with the people that were still in that circle grew.”

In time, that grief became part of her work.

Burgard helped build what was then known as Hopeful Heart Project, a nonprofit serving families experiencing pregnancy and infant loss. The work was intimate and tender. It meant walking alongside people in the most devastating moments of their lives. It meant creating healing gifts. It meant offering support when language often fails. It meant knowing, firsthand, that grief does not end when the flowers die, when the lasagna is gone, or when everyone else quietly goes back to normal.

But Burgard’s story did not become simpler once she found purpose in the work.

It became more complicated.

In the years after Henry’s death, Burgard poured herself into supporting other families experiencing pregnancy and infant loss. She helped build what was then known as Hopeful Heart Project, a nonprofit rooted in tenderness, memory-making, and the belief that no family should have to walk through loss alone.

The work was sacred. It was also deeply personal.

And eventually, it brought another kind of grief.

A close friendship and working relationship with Kayla, someone Burgard had trusted deeply inside that grief-support world, began to unravel after painful questions surfaced around Kayla’s own story of loss. Burgard has written publicly about that chapter, including the confusion, loyalty, doubt, and heartbreak that came with trying to understand what was true while also protecting a mission that mattered to grieving families.

For Burgard, the details of that experience are less central now than what it exposed in her: the weakness of not knowing what to believe, the ache of wondering what she missed, and the regret that can follow when love, trust, grief, and leadership collide.

“I have so many regrets,” Burgard said. “Absolutely.”

That is one of the things she wishes people would ask her more directly. Not the polished question. Not the one that lets her give the easy answer. The harder one.

Do you carry guilt and regret?

Her answer is yes.

She carries regret from the day Henry died. Regret from the days after. Regret about work, relationships, decisions, and moments she wishes she could redo. She carries regret about things she missed and things she did not understand at the time.

“And they eat at me,” she said.

That honesty is central to her message. Burgard does not want to stand in front of people and pretend she has mastered grief, motherhood, leadership, forgiveness, or life.

“I’m not over here 100% like, ‘This is the way you do it,’” she said. “That’s not how it works.”

The world often wants stories like hers to resolve cleanly. A mother loses a child. She starts an organization. She helps others. She becomes strong. She inspires people.

But Burgard is more interested in the parts that do not fit that arc. The parts where someone makes the best decision they can with the information they have, and later wonders if they should have known more.

“There is strength and beauty and value in simply just surviving,” Burgard said. “In simply just getting up every single day and just getting stuff done.”

That belief has changed the way she thinks about support.

When someone is grieving, Burgard’s advice is to not ignore it.

Especially in the Midwest, she said, people have a habit of sending a meal and moving on. The gesture is kind. But grief does not end when the meal train ends.

Instead of asking, “What can I do?” Burgard encourages people to offer something specific.

Drop off coffee. Do the laundry. Watch the kids. Send a message that says you are thinking about them and the person they lost. If they say no, try again later.

“Just do the thing,” she said.

And if someone has died, say their name.

“They haven’t forgotten that their person died,” Burgard said. “They’re terrified that everyone else has.”

Before Henry died, Burgard understood the fear of saying the wrong thing. The loss of a child made her uncomfortable too. She knows why people freeze. They do not want to hurt someone. They do not want to make grief worse. They do not want to end up on a list of things people should never say.

That is why Burgard does not like focusing only on what not to say.

“I think we scare people out of saying anything,” she said.

Instead, she wants people to practice showing up.

Say, “I’m here with you.”

Say, “I can’t fix this.”

Say, “I’ll sit with you in it.”

Then actually sit.

The people who helped Burgard most were not the ones who tried to explain away the pain. They were the ones who stayed. They watched movies. They prayed, when prayer fit the moment. They sat on the couch. They allowed the silence to be awkward. They allowed grief to exist without rushing to make it useful.

“Sit with them in the uncomfortable,” Burgard said. “Get weak with them.”

Burgard knows that is difficult. To truly imagine someone else’s loss, even briefly, can feel almost unbearable. But she believes people are more capable of it than they think.

“You can go back to putting that armor back up,” she said. “You shouldn’t have to walk around holding that all day either. But give that person five minutes.”

Burgard sees it in ordinary connection, too. She has never loved small talk. It drains her. She would rather know what someone actually cares about, what they are thinking, what they are carrying.

“When I meet someone, I love to just get to know who they are and what they’re thinking and what they actually care about,” she said. “That’s connecting with humans.”

It is also why she thinks so many attempts at connection fail. Traditional icebreakers, forced introductions, “fun facts”—to Burgard, those often do the opposite of what they are meant to do. They make people self-conscious instead of connected.

Through her work, she has seen the value of shared experience. Haven events often include an activity—floral workshops, creative projects, something people can do with their hands—because connection often comes more naturally when people are making something, laughing at themselves, and being imperfect together.

“Let yourself be bad at something in front of someone else and you’ll all laugh together,” she said.

Burgard’s own relationship with trust has changed, too. She once trusted blindly. Now, trust is earned slowly.

After everything she has lived through, she has had to learn how to let people in again, one small step at a time. New people entered her life gradually. Some taught her things. Some opened her eyes. She did not have to give them full access to her heart all at once.

She could check in with the people who had remained in her smaller circle. She could ask whether a feeling was intuition or trauma. She could admit she did not have it all figured out.

That, too, is weakness.

And that, too, is strength.

When asked what gives her purpose today, Burgard paused. The answer was not as automatic as it might have been years ago.

At one time, she may have said the organization was her purpose. Helping families was her purpose.

Now, she sees it differently.

“I think my purpose is inspiring change,” she said.

That change begins close to home. Burgard wants to give her children and her family a different life experience than the one she had. Not necessarily better, she said, but different. She wants her community to be more open to growth. She wants people to be willing to look at grief, loss, weakness, and regret without turning away.

That is one of the reasons she said yes to TEDxFargo, even though the stage itself is outside her comfort zone.

“I think I have something to share that makes sense and that matters and is worth exploring,” she said.

havenmidwest.org /havenmidwest @haven_midwest

TEDxFargo Speaker: Kenny Lee

Finding Common Ground in the Field

Kenny Lee did not grow up around agriculture. He did not come from a farming family. He did not spend childhood summers in a tractor.

His path to agriculture started with a question.

What industry needed help?

For Lee, the answer eventually led him far from the tech corridors he knew well and into fields, farm shops, combines, and conversations across middle America. Which, ultimately, led him to build solar-powered robots designed to remove weeds without fuel, heavy tillage, or chemical spraying.

But if you ask Lee what he may speak about at TEDxFargo, the answer is not simply robotics. Or artificial intelligence. Or startup life.

It is about common ground.

“I’m not from the ag industry,” Lee said. “I didn’t grow up in ag. I switched over to a completely new industry that I had no idea about when I was in my early 40s.”

Lee is also an immigrant who moved to the United States from South Korea when he was 6 years old. He grew up in Brooklyn, spent time in Durham, NC, and later lived in Guam. Along the way, he learned how to move between worlds—racially, culturally, geographically, and professionally.

As a child in Brooklyn, many of his closest friends were Black and Puerto Rican. Later, he found himself in blue-collar communities shaped by police, firefighters, Jewish families, and working-class neighborhoods. In middle school, he remembers being the only Asian kid among roughly 400 students, moving between white and Black friend groups in a school where racial divisions were impossible to ignore.

“I sort of rode the line in between that, because I belonged to neither group,” Lee said.

Then, in high school in Guam, he had Asian peers who looked more like him. That, too, felt unfamiliar.

Those early experiences shaped him. They taught him how to listen without needing to belong completely. They taught him how to build trust quickly. They taught him that identity can be complicated, but connection does not always have to be.

Today, he still uses those lessons.

“One day I’m just hanging out with a farmer and his combine,” Lee said. “The next day I’m in the tech world at Nvidia and Amazon.”

He can move between those spaces because, in many ways, he has been doing it his entire life. And while Lee does not pretend America’s tensions are imaginary—he has experienced racism, and he knows how heated conversations around immigration, race, and politics can become—his work in agriculture has reinforced a different truth.

People are more complicated than stereotypes.

Extreme opinions are always loud, but they're not the country. Most people are somewhere in the middle, just trying to do what's best for their families and their communities.

What he has seen instead, particularly in the states and communities where agriculture is central, is a shared desire to build something better.

“At the heart of it all,” he said, “everybody wants what’s best for the country. They may have different paths and opinions on how you actually get there, but at the end of the day, there’s this common thread.”

That belief has become part of his work.

Lee did not enter agriculture by assuming he had the answer. In fact, he began by admitting the opposite.

After returning to school in his 40s for an Executive MBA at MIT Sloan, he became interested in systems thinking, particularly through the lens of sustainability. What struck him was the delay built into it. Human beings are not naturally wired to respond to consequences that unfold over decades.

“You have to think about a span of decades,” Lee said. “You’re really thinking about how it impacts your kids or your kids’ kids, not about your life tomorrow. And that’s hard.”

The more he studied, the clearer it became that there was no single fix.

Electric vehicles alone would not get us there. Solar wouldn't either. Neither would more efficient homes. No single industry could move the needle by itself.

“Every single industry needs to contribute,” Lee said.

So he started looking for an industry that met two criteria. It had to be underfunded, and it had to be difficult—not just technologically, but socially and culturally.

He landed on agriculture.

“I knew nothing about agriculture,” Lee said. “One thing I knew when you used that word to me was farming, so I was going to start farming.”

He enrolled in a hands-on farming practicum, where he was given a plot of land and worked through the basics of water management, fertilization rates, seeding, weeding, harvesting, and selling produce at a farmers market.

“I use farming loosely,” he said. “Farmers are going to say, ‘No, you hardly farmed.’”

But the experience gave him enough familiarity to begin conversations without sounding like a software salesman parachuting into an industry he did not understand.

From there, Lee spent a season traveling through roughly eight or nine states, including Washington, Idaho, Oregon, California, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Iowa, and North Dakota. He talked with as many farmers as he could, asking what they actually needed.

He did not lead with technology. He did not lead with a pitch deck. He did not lead with a robot.

He led with the problem.

“I know nothing about farming,” he would tell them.

Then he would ask a version of this question: If you had a friend who was a nerdy tech kid and could build robots or software or something else, what would you want them to build? What problem would you want them to solve?

Again and again, the answer came back to weed control.

“That kept on coming up,” he said. “I didn’t know that it was going to be a weed-control solution.”

At first, he looked at companies already working in agricultural robotics and novel weed-control technologies. But he noticed a gap. Some solutions were built for specialty crops in places like California. Others were expensive laser weeders that could cost more than $1 million.

That might work for some operations. It would not work for many of the farmers he had been meeting across the Midwest.

That gap became the opening for Aigen, the ag-tech robotics company Lee co-founded with Richard Wurden, a former Tesla engineer.

The mission was not only to build technology for agriculture. It was to build technology aligned with the realities of farmers and the conservation priorities Lee cared about from the beginning.

His company’s robots, Aigen Element, do something diesel and herbicide cannot. They work continuously, powered by the sun, removing herbicide-resistant weeds one plant at a time. Less tillage. Less spraying. Healthier soil underneath.

“I wanted to make sure that these priorities align in the solution that we built,” he said. “The robot had to earn its own energy to get the job done.”

A person from outside agriculture entered the industry not by trying to disrupt it from a distance, but by learning from the people already inside it. A startup founder working with robotics and AI found his strongest insight not in a lab, but in conversations with farmers. An immigrant who has lived between cultures found, in farm country, not alienation but connection.

“I always like to root for the underdogs,” he said.

And when he looks at agriculture, that is what he sees. He sees an industry that feeds people, supports communities, carries generational knowledge, and yet is often misunderstood by the very people building the future.

“Spending so much time on the coast and in high tech, those areas really do not understand agriculture, food, and farming,” Lee said.

That misunderstanding goes both ways sometimes. Technology can feel abstract. Agriculture can feel distant. Sustainability can feel political. Rural America can be flattened into caricature. Immigrants can be, too.

Lee’s life and work challenge those simplifications.

He has seen division. He has lived across it. But he has also seen what happens when people stop talking in categories and start talking about problems they can solve

aigen.io

@Aigenio

/aigeninc

@aigen-inc

TEDxFargo Speaker: Ryan Mauk

To Walk Amongst the Giants

By the time most people see a wall cloud, they are already looking for shelter. Ryan Mauk sees something else first.

He sees motion. Structure. Pressure. Shape. A living system pulling itself together in real time. He sees danger, yes, but also presence. A kind of scale that makes a person feel very small, and, strangely, very alive.

That feeling has followed him since childhood.

“I have been fascinated by tornadoes since I was like five years old,” Mauk said. “I have memories of being in daycare and there’d be tornado warnings and the teachers are trying to pull me inside, and I’m out the door like, ‘No, I want to see.’”

That curiosity eventually became storm chasing. Then filmmaking. Then an online cinematic series called The Rear Flank, where Mauk documents severe weather with the eye of a storyteller rather than a highlight-reel hunter.

But the real story is not just that Mauk runs toward tornadoes.

It is that, in many ways, he has been doing that his whole life.

Today, Mauk is a Flight RN in Fargo, a filmmaker, a father, and one of the region’s most distinct storm chasers. His professional life puts him inside high-stress situations where seconds matter. His creative life puts him underneath rotating supercells, waiting to see whether the sky will organize itself into something beautiful, violent, or both.

His upcoming TEDx talk is tentatively titled “To Walk Amongst the Giants,” a phrase he uses to describe what it feels like to stand in the presence of the atmosphere’s most powerful moments. It is also a metaphor for the rest of his life: fear, chaos, failure, reinvention, and the decision to keep moving anyway.

“When you witness something like that up close,” Mauk said, “it almost seems like there’s a palpable presence there. Almost like an alien landing.”

“Every time I’m out there and I see something like that,” he said, “it’s just another walk amongst the Giants.”

The First Chase

Mauk’s first storm chase happened on foot.

He was about 16, hanging around Clara Barton Elementary School in South Fargo with a friend named Ted, when he looked up and noticed something happening in the clouds. The storm had a lower, shelf-like feature. Scud clouds were rising into it. The air was moving in a way that made sense to him, even then.

“That’s a wall cloud,” he remembers thinking. “That’s going to throw down a tornado.”

They ran to grab a camcorder—the old kind with a VHS tape—and headed toward Lindenwood Park. From the concrete baseball bleachers, they watched a funnel begin to form as the storm moved southeast toward Minnesota.

They filmed it.

Then, years later, the tape disappeared.

Mauk has searched for it. At one point, he found a VHS labeled “severe storms 96” in his own handwriting. But the footage was gone, likely taped over.

“That was my first chase ever,” he said. “And it was on foot.”

The first successful chase he planned—the first time he studied the setup, weighed the forecast, drove toward the target, and actually saw what he hoped to see—came much later, on Father’s Day in 2015 near Bison, SD.

That day changed the hobby into something more serious.

“From that point on is when it really, really took off for me,” he said. “That was like, ‘Oh my God, this is it. I’m in love. I have to go do this again.’”

Mauk had already been interested in cameras by then. His path into filmmaking started through music. He wanted a music video, could not get one made the way he wanted, bought a camera, and taught himself.

“I made some awful music videos and learned the hard way,” he said.

That learning curve became useful. Storm chasing, after all, is not studio work. There is no controlled set. No repeat take. No guarantee that the subject will appear. Mauk might drive hundreds of miles, study a dozen variables, prepare a concept, and end the day with nothing but wind, rain, and a long ride home.

He likes it anyway.

“I bring out a cinema camera, and I have a rough plot idea,” he said. “Nature will provide the props or they won’t.”

Not Another Tornado Video

There is no shortage of storm-chasing footage online.

Much of it looks the same with a shaky camera, roaring wind, someone yelling offscreen, a tornado in the distance, maybe debris crossing the road. It can be thrilling. It can also flatten the experience into a single moment.

Mauk wanted something else.

He wanted atmosphere. Build-up. Chase strategy. Silence. Music. The loneliness of a road grid. The tension of waiting. The emotional arc of the day.

“I always wanted to find out specifically what’s my niche,” he said.

That niche became The Rear Flank.

The series took shape in 2021 during a chase near Selden, KS. Mauk and his chase partners had been weighing whether to stay in South Dakota or drop south toward Kansas. The better target looked farther away, so they went. That day, Mauk decided to make something different. He launched his drone, thought through the story, and built the episode around more than the tornado itself.

“That was episode one,” he said. “And then from there there’s episode two and three. I’m like, okay, this is my format.”

As of the interview, Mauk said the series was 25 episodes deep.

In all of them, he does not want to be only a person who documents storms. He wants to translate the feeling of being near them.